Monday, April 7, 2014

In honor of my favorite anime series ever, I present you the Mobile Suit Gundam opening theme. On this day in 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam launched, changing the face of anime forever. I've been rediscovering the original series through the hardcovers of Gundam: The Origin rom Vertical books and they are awesome, except for some weird placement of words inside the original word balloons.

Anyway, Gundam is awesome and Universal Century is the best Gundam universe, regardless of what those insane G Gundam fans will tell you.

Over the weekend we had three nerd or nerd adjacent events
happening that would be subject to concerns about spoilers; Captain America 2,
the Game of Thrones premiere, and Wrestlemania. Now, fortunately the Game of Thrones
premiere, while good, did not have a lot going on that people could complain
about even if spoiled (that’ll come next week, trust me), so I didn’t actually
see any complaining about it, which is nice. The other two things I did see a
bit of complaining about, and it got me to ask if we complain too much about
things being spoiled.

Now, I’m not going to say that I haven’t complained about
something being spoiled for me in the past, and I can understand the
frustration from it. Nobody, least of all me, wants to have their enjoyment of
something ruined because someone couldn’t keep their big mouth shut. Call it The
Sixth Sense Syndrome. Ever since that movie came out, we as a film obsesses community
have become increasingly obsessed with having every single moment of a movie
not spoiled before you see the movie.

When it comes to Cap 2, I can understand why someone who
hasn’t seen it would want to go in fresh, but to be honest, that movie was so predictable
that I would call it spoiler proof. There’s one character that shows up in the
middle that’s a little surprising to see, and is awesome, but the plot beats? I
had them figured out from the commercials. One of my problems with the movie is
that it’s so damn predictable but the films writers and directors pretend like
I’m supposed to be shocked.

As for Wrestlemania, it’s a live sporting event, and even
though the WWE has a new streaming service and there is a new way to time shift
it, I’m sorry but people are going to be watching and talking about it online
live. Nobody gets to complain about the Super Bowl being spoiled for them.

In the end, my complaint is that our social media discussion
is now being determined by people who either time shift their TV watching, or
by people who either wait or don’t have the time to see a movie on the first
weekend. And again, I can understand that people with wives, kids, responsibilities,
what have you are not able to see it right away. And if you see the movie on
Thursday night and are shouting out important plot points the same night, that’s
kind of being a dick. However, if I don’t have a wife, kids, responsibilities,
what have you, why do I need to wait some mysteriously determined amount of
time to talk about something online? Why do the people who wait the longest get
to decide when I can talk about something?

This is all just a part of a bigger online problem where
everyone just wants to complain about stuff, which is EXACTLY what I’m doing
now, so the snake will just continually eat its own tail. We are all Goldilocks
looking for the perfect bowl of porridge and if you follow people on twitter or
facebook who continually spoil stuff for you, maybe stop following them.

I don’t know, sometimes I just get sick of seeing people
complain about the horror of having stuff spoiled and I just needed to vent
about it. I recognize I am a hypocrite about it, if that helps. And if I have
such a need to talk about something I just saw, or something I watched live,
maybe I should be finding a place to talk to like-minded people. Maybe twitter,
which is my primary social media, isn’t the best place for these kinds of discussions.
I hate message boards though, so maybe the problem is me and I just need to not
worry so much about this. I like to think I’m pretty good about censoring
myself and not ruining things for others.

Anyway, agree/disagree, my rant is over and you can go on
with your day. I think I may try to get back to using this blog more often. Who
the hell knows.